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/r/technology is a place to share and discuss the latest developments, happenings and curiosities in the world of technology; a broad spectrum of conversation as to the innovations, aspirations, applications and machinations that define our age and shape our future.

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I fear all the ask reddits... what's your darkest secret? What are you hiding from everyone? Etc... are being compiled into dossiers with the attempt to link anonymous Reddit accounts to our real accounts for later use if it can be used for blackmail or other nefarious ends. It's already known Russia is all up inside reddit so why wouldn't they or someone else attempt to cultivate all this free info?

Microsoft already is already working on the search back end for Reddit - so yeah all that information is being feed into their systems. Wouldn't surprise me if they would try and correlate it to the monstrous data base from the Windows 10 data feed which can also correlate to Facebook accounts as it is.

It's even scarier if you know the technical insights. I have said before that some of those companies should be included in net neutrality talks and everyone was like "What? No...". They are bigger than any ISP and control more information and traffic. Tim Berners is just one of the persons saying this. I'm saying something similar for years but most people think they are just "websites" when that is far from the truth.

Google is now even trying to push their web protocol with AMP which means hosting your site on Google servers to be relevant in search results. And Google can and will push proprietary protocols over the web in the future as they own most of the browsing market share with Chrome. They are the web gatekeepers now. Between Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon the Internet is fundamentally centralized today.

And Google can and will push proprietary protocols over the web in the future as they own most of the browsing market share with Chrome. They are the web gatekeepers now. Between Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon the Internet is fundamentally centralized today.

Well it's up to governments to regulate this sort of thing. If they have the balls that is...

I usually against government regulations in general because they do more harm than good, but it is unfair asking just regulation for some ISP and not other companies that have even more influence and a more significant monopoly in some areas. This is why I think if net neutrality should be a "thing" it should include more than just some ISP's.

I would agree it should be more than ISPs, but no, I'm not opposed to government regulation. Not when there's a history of corporate abuse and nothing else works. If they aren't going to change voluntarily then they're gonna have to be forced into doing it.

I'm more on the libertarian side. Governments, in general, have a vast history of abusing its citizens and power. You may be okay with regulations with your current leaders, but nothing prevents terrible people from gaining control in the future. Then you will profoundly regret giving them that kind of power. The more control a government has, the less free people are as history shows us repeatedly.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with the free market regulating itself. It has worked fine so far in most fields. The problem is when there is no competition. A company can't abuse its power if it has fair competition because they will lose their customers to the better option. Its as simple as that. The bigger problem is that there is little to no competition in some markets today and so companies can get away with plenty of things as you have no choice.

I disagree. Forcing anyone into something will not lead to more competition. It is not your right to be served by a private company. Nobody is forcing anyone to buy a product or service.

A company can decide to shut down the business or leave a country if they conclude it's not worth. If you wish strong government regulations on the free market, see how that worked out for countries like Venezuela. They don't even have toilet paper anymore.

It can also work the other way around. What if the government decides you can only use the Internet 3 hours a day because its bad for your health?

Some regulation is fine. But it should be applied in a fair way (and very carefully) to all parties involved. Otherwise, it causes distortions by not leveling the field and giving disadvantages or advantages to specific companies. Regulation is the evil of innovation.

Oh, I was not trying to change your mind or believes in any way. I just expressed my opinion and the reasoning for it. If you think the free enterprise sector is bullshit and you don't believe in freedom what the hell are you doing here on Reddit in the first place?

Reddit is a private corporation run by private individuals (Reddit Inc.) hosted in a private datacenter connected to network carriers operated by private companies.

And you are only allowed to post what you posted because moderators respect your view and most likely also believe in free speech. You apparently take advantages of those "free private market features" but call others people opinions bullshit, which is kind of ironic.

It might be difficult to compete with a big company without having lots of money, especially for marketing. Almost everyone already associates "search engine" with Google, "video site" with YouTube and "social media" with Facebook + Twitter. This is indeed dangerous.

However, Tim Berners-Lee is right: it's not too late to fix it, but I think that much effort would be required.

This is why the underlying infrastructure should be controlled by the state: let your tax dollars go to run fiber, then the state rents those pipes to ISPs. ISPs can tailor their service to their clientbase, allowing a much broader selection of services and greater competition (plus, the state gets revenue to further upgrade fiber, or fund other taxed endeavours, etc.).

Honestly, the idea of "video site" is backwards in itself. Anyone can, and should, drop WebM/H.264 videos onto a cheap web host and serve their own videos with a single HTML tag. There shouldn't be centralised video sites at all...

The general public keeps taking good, decentralised ideas and choosing to use centralised alternatives controlled by large companies instead.

IRC and Jabber? Nope, let's use Slack and Discord.

Blogs? Nah, post stuff on Facebook/Tumblr/Medium.

Forums? Reddit took over and they kind of faded into relative obscurity.

The Web seems to have shrunk substantially in the past decade, solidifying around a handful of companies.

Serving millions of views of a gigabyte video costs money. It costs money that's hard to recover without an ad platform backing you, because few people will pay to view your stuff.

While it's possible to host your own Let's Play videos, it's expensive and ineffective at getting to your audience.

While it's possible to host your advertising videos on your own site, nobody is going to go to your site to watch your ads.

While it's possible to host your political / ideological recruitment videos on your own site, nobody is going to find them as easily as they will on YouTube next to all your like-minded brothers in arms.

And you couldn't find anything, and netnews wasn't centralized for advertising purposes, yes. We've moved away from that. We could go back to that, but having only the dispossessed going back to that is just going to make it worse for the dispossessed.

The monolithic nature of these beasts is their biggest strength and weakness. It allow for a lot of power to congregate but it also allow the failures to be big and prominent.

I really hope that people start to decentralize somewhat in the next decade, looking at the Youtube censorship issues nowadays, people may start to realize that the convenience big services provide isn't such a good thing after all.

There are merits? This is the DRM that thousands of researchers basically begged to put in terms that would allow them to find security flaws without being labeled a criminal in most countries. All of those terms were declared unnecessary and the companies got exactly what they wanted.

It doesn't matter if the DRM can be broken easily or not. It only matters that the content is encrypted or otherwise protected in order to prevent copying. If you live in the US, or a country that bends to the will of the US on copyright law, then the act of defeating any such mechanism is illegal.

I agree that it sucks, but humans are really good at bucking the system. I'm sure things that you described will happen, but I'm also sure we will find ways around them

The point is we should not have to, and while some humans will be able to get around them, just like we can get around DRM on media, there are HUGE parts of the population that will be locked out. I have issues with that, sad you do not

It's already happening in terrible, terrible ways. College humor laid off their entire editorial staff, because no one visits college humor's url anymore, they see all the best parts/highlights on their Facebook feed. So CH is left with two choices; pay Facebook to re-engage people who are already fans so that CH can grab declining ad revenue, or close up shop.

I really feel like the US is asleep at the wheel here. A lot of tech companies are acting like good stewards because they know they have to. I don't believe it to be altruistic, I believe it to be out of survival. The second they do something underhanded using all of the data and power that they have, they will see an antitrust suit. This suit should have happened yesterday, particularly against Facebook.

Perhaps he should have thought of that before Granting these companies DRM in the standard and allowing these companies extreme amounts of power in the W3C.

Tim Burners-Lee is a sellout puppet of these very companies he is "warning" everyone about... I could not care less what this person has to say any more on this Topic, He lost all creditably when he approved EME

A lifetime of achievement and he loses your faith because of a single decision you don’t like?

When that decision is contrary to every word he has ever spoken then yes...

You can not out of one side of your mouth promote openness and freedom, then out of the other proclaim EME the best thing since sliced bread

These are the mutually exclusive positions, EME is designed by these large companies he is talking about "weaponizing" the web to lock out people from the web, one of the "weapons" they are going to use is EME that he approved.

I doubt you can even explain what the pros and cons of the EME standard are.

Its also a way to make sure come content can only be consumed on secured devices, devices which are coincidentally developed again by those same big companies. The open web is powerful because everyone, everywhere can and should be able to participate in creating and consuming content. Blocking some platforms which cannot (eg, because they are open source, or are designed to not carry advertisement; think screen-readers for blind people ) participate in this, means blocking the open web, just like app-stores and walled gardens have done the last 5 years.

I agree with you. I’m all for monopoly breaking in for the promotion of a healthy marketplace. But regulation of the monopoly to keep them from limiting website content A so that content B has a chance could get slippery. No doubt big tech promotes content to its advantage. But I’m not sure that government regulating content is a better idea. I’d rather govt. prevent monopolies from controlling access to resources like creating and viewing content (net neutrality)

It’s easier to create another google or Facebook if you don’t like it. It’s not easy to lay down miles of wire and set up servers. That’s where we need govt.